If we were to look at the position of women within the legal profession, to set it in its context one should probably go back historically to the Sex Disqualification Act which was in 1919. Now what that did was that enabled women, for the first time, to enter the legal profession, and although the legislation was passed in 1919, the first women entered the profession in 1922. I believe that that has an impact on the position of women within the profession today. I feel that the historical context would mean that it probably has adversely affected and impacted on women within their jobs in law today.
As far as women in the solicitors profession are concerned, our year for example in 1985 was the first year in which there were more women law graduates than men, so looking at them in their professional capacity ten years later, you would have expected to see the same progression of women within the profession as men. But when I looked to see if that was the case, I then realised that women hadn't progressed to partnership level or equity partner level the same way that men of our year had done. Historically you can see therefore that the impact would be that women were not as welcome into the profession and to this day do not seem to progress at the same rate.
And is there any evidence to suggest that women are confined to what would be considered the caring part of the legal profession?
There is an argument that can be made today that women find themselves in less lucrative legal work than men, and that they do tend to go into what are deemed to be the caring ends of the profession - for example, the family work, domestic work, divorce work, children's work. And it is true that you would find more women in that end of the profession, whereas men would be more in the commercial work and corporate work and that would be more lucrative. And again the argument would be that if you are trying to progress yourself within the profession, it becomes harder to do that if economically you are not as viable as somebody who is doing corporate and commercial work.